something new.

when I started online journaling, I was in tenth grade, literally and almost exactly half my lifetime ago. at the time, while I wasn’t foolish enough to try and hide my internet presence from my family or my school-friends, I certainly didn’t want them to follow me around online. nor did I particularly want my AOL friends to know me as a real-life human, which is why for several years there were probably more people calling me Kaz than rabi on a daily basis. it was never an alter-ego, exactly; rabi and kazzie were the same person, but the intersection of each girl’s friends would be such a tiny sliver on a venn diagram that I’m not even sure it would be visible. (at least not if the circles were scaled by population size.)

anyway, my little AOL journal became my little college weblog became my not-so-little blog. and then blogs became BLOGS, I became an adult, and my distaste for the word blog turned into a more general dislike for, well, blogging. I will spare you (and myself) the usual lamenting about how Things Have Changed on the Internet, because of-freaking-course they have, and yeah I miss my old community but I sure don’t miss listening to modem-dialing sounds or wondering if blogger was going to disappear completely and take my archive of posts with it. (I was a sophomore in college when pyra nearly self-destructed along with the rest of the dotcom bubble.) to me, reading sad posts about how things were better back when I started blogging feels the same as hearing people complain about how their favorite bands were better before they got a major label deal. listen to music you like: your old favorites might have gone a little too mainstream for your tastes, but there’s no shortage of awesome new independent bands out there. blog the way you want to blog: yeah, the corporate-sponsorship-monetization wave has been pretty disgusting, but the whole point of self-publishing is that you decide what you want to put out there.

the point of which is this: I want to put something here.

what, exactly? I think I want this website to evolve in the opposite direction that many do. I don’t want to build an audience or count pageviews. I don’t want to be a part of any particular movement or genre. what I do want is:

something that my family can read and know what I’m up to. while I once cringed at the thought of my mother reading my journal, now she’s my favorite fan. (can you tell I’m in my thirties?)

a record of my often-happy little brooklyn life, and the eventual growth of my own family.*

a place to write, if I want to write.

and… that’s all, really. storytelling is probably too ambitious for me anymore, and I’m too public with my name to write anything about my job. I still subscribe to the philosophy that everything I put here is something I should be comfortable sharing with my boss, my students, my students’ parents, my dissertation committee**, my hockey teammates, strangers on the subway, and anyone else on the planet. so possibly it’ll be a little bland, or boring, or unremarkable. I’m okay with that. I just want it to be something again.

and if you want to read it, all the better. but if you don’t, that’s okay with me.

* since I am newly married, and since I didn’t announce my impending marriage to pretty much anyone until about a month ahead of time, there has been speculation swirling within my family and my workplace about how pregnant I am. or maybe the speculation comes more from the fact that I haven’t made my desire to be a parent any kind of secret. while the stubborn side of me has come out in response and I actually at one point said, “now I want to never have a baby, just to prove them wrong!”… the truth is I am happily looking forward to building a family, one way or another. at this point though I’m still actively preventing that so if you are wanting cute baby photos there is an indeterminately long wait ahead of you.

** HA. I don’t even have a dissertation committee right now, that’s what a terrible PhD student I am. but my stubborn self is determined to get that sorted out one of these days.

Yay. I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point where I want my mother to be updated about me. Oh well.

August 21st, 2012 at 9:28 am

Mom:

Yayyyyyyy!!!!
I can’t even begin to express what a happy-happy feeling I have reading that I am your favorite fan! I have no idea what that really means, but I feel so welcome and loved. 🙂 And very pleased to look forward to more chances to see you (in writing) and crow with pleasure over all you do. Because I always want to hear what you have to say. 😀

August 23rd, 2012 at 2:09 pm

chris:

Fantastic news!! Congatulations and I hope you’re very happy!!

August 26th, 2012 at 4:35 pm

Martha:

I’m really happy about this! I feel hungry all the time lately for long-form blogging.

August 27th, 2012 at 2:42 pm

Ellen:

Hi Rabi,

I was just trying to remember how long ago I joined “not”. I remembered that you were 15 at the time, and wondered how long it would take me looking through “wockerjabby” to figure out your age. I picked a good time to look. Congratulations on your marriage! It is great “seeing” you and your family!